2018-12-02

I've been trying for almost a year to figure out how to get the cloud-init meta-data service to work with the Ubuntu Cloud image. I've asked on misc@ and other OpenBSD groups, and no one has an answer. The documentation is vague. If anyone ever figures out how to configure meta-data, let me know. I'd still like to give it a shot.

Last week, I rescued a server from a pile of computers destined to be scrapped and recycled. For me, it's the perfect setup for getting serious with OpenBSD VMM in my home lab. Two older Xeon E5-2620 CPUs and 128 GB of RAM. No hard drives, but it came with enough empty drive trays for getting started. I threw a pair of old SAS drives into it.

No surprise, OpenBSD just worked. This renewed my fervor for replicating a bunch of my cloud instances at home, and there's a lot of Ubuntu in use.

I decided to bite the bullet and just use qemu to do the installation and configuration of Ubuntu. Install qemu from packages:

doas pkg_add qemu

Download Ubuntu Server. I've actually used both 18.04 LTS and 16.04 LTS. I'm focusing on 16.04 for this because that's what I'm running on most of my EC2 instances.

Install Ubuntu as usual. I didn't bother adding anything other than the SSH server during installation. qemu is really slow on OpenBSD, but it works... eventually. When the install is done, shut down and then restart qemu without the installation ISO attached.

qemu-system-x86_64 -drive file=ubuntu16lts.qcow2,media=disk -m 640

Log in with the user-level account you created. There are only two things to tweak before it's ready to run in vmm: Configuring the serial console, and the network interface.

Under qemu, Ubuntu sees "ens3" as the network interface. Under vmm, the network interface is "enp0s3". Change "ens3" to "enp0s3" in /etc/network/interfaces if you're using 16.04. On Ubuntu 18.04, you must instead change the "netplan" config file in /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml with the same kind of change, ens3 to enp0s3.

To configure the serial console, edit /etc/default/grub and change this line:

2018-11-01

With OpenBSD 6.4, the VMM hypervisor got support for qcow2 disk images. This format is used by QEMU, but it has several features that make it a better choice than raw image files. The images are dynamically-allocated, so the disk image file grows as you use more space instead of taking up the entire filesystem size when the image is created. It won't ever shrink, though. "Derived images" are also supported. While VMM doesn't officially support snapshots yet, you can kind of get away with using derived images to do something similar. I'll cover that toward the end of this article.

You will probably want to have the networking set up on your OpenBSD VM host before you continue. That information is covered in Part 2 of my VMM series.

To create a qcow2 image, prefix the image file name with qcow2:

vmctl create qcow2:obsd64-base.qcow2 -s 10G

--OR--

You can also use the qemu-img utility (from qemu in the package repository) to convert an existing raw image to qcow2 format, if you've already been using VMM before OpenBSD 6.4 was released. This image file will not be dynamically sized, but it can serve as a base image for derivatives:

qemu-img convert obsd64.img obsd64-base.qcow2

Start the VM using your bsd.rd as the boot image, then follow the installer prompts.

When the install is done, rebooting will just bring the installer back. Exit to shell instead, type "halt -p" and use the ~. command sequence to exit the VM. Anything else you press will probably reboot the system (back into the installer). Now you have a pristine, freshly-installed OpenBSD image to start from.

To create a derived image, select your base image with the -b option to vmctl create:

vmctl create qcow2:obsd64-test1.qcow2 -b obsd64-base.qcow2

WARNING: If you make any changes to the base image, all derived image files it was based on will become corrupt and unusable. You can remove write access to the base image if you want. The VMs relying on derived images will run fine.

chmod 400 obsd64-base.qcow2

Now, create a VM in /etc/vm.conf with the new obsd64-test1.qcow2 image file. All changes will be stored in this new image file. The original filesystem image will remain unchanged, and you can make as many derived images as you want from it.

# bridge0 for VMs, NAT and dhcpd (required for networking in this example)

switch "local" {

interface bridge0

}

# OpenBSD Stable

vm "test.vm" {

disable

owner axon

memory 512M

disk "/home/axon/vmm/obsd64-test1.qcow2"

interface {

switch "local"

lladdr fe:e1:ba:d0:eb:ab

}

}

Reload vmm's configuration:

doas vmctl reload

Then go ahead and boot it up with the console attached:

vmctl start test.vm -c

For snapshot-like functionality, you can make a copy of your derived image and save it with another file name in the same directory. You should shut down the VM before you do this, though. To restore, just copy it back over the derived image, or create a new vm clause in /etc/vm.conf pointing to your saved derived image file.

cp obsd64-test1.qcow2 snapshot-2018-11-01_obsd64-test1.qcow2

You can run multiple VMs at the same time, with different derived images from the base image as well. If I create a new derived image file and add a vm clause for it, both VMs can run at the same time.

vmctl create qcow2:obsd64-test2.qcow2 -b obsd64-base.qcow2

I added this to /etc/vm.conf:

# OpenBSD test2

vm "test2.vm" {

disable

owner axon

memory 512M

disk "/home/axon/vmm/obsd64-test2.qcow2"

interface {

switch "local"

lladdr fe:e1:ba:d0:eb:ac

}

}

Reload vmm, and start up your VMs!

doas vmctl reload

vmctl start test.vm

vmctl start test2.vm

You can attach to the consoles of each to see that they're running. Remember that you can use the [RETURN]~. key sequence to exit the console.

2018-10-29

OpenBSD has, arguably, some of the best officially-maintained documentation of any modern operating system. Solene Rapenne added a new FAQ section for Virtualization that covers getting OpenBSD's VMM hypervisor off the ground, and it gets the basics out of the way pretty well.

The FAQ kind of glosses over the more elaborate network configuration schemes, one of which I covered in Part 2 of my VMM article a while ago, though if you poke around between the FAQ and man pages, you can find pretty much all you need.

There are some new features to VMM which I plan on writing about soon. Stay tuned!

2018-10-27

Windows Defender Antivirus has hit a new milestone: the built-in antivirus capabilities on Windows can now run within a sandbox. With this new development, Windows Defender Antivirus becomes the first complete antivirus solution to have this capability and continues to lead the industry in raising the bar for security.

Sandboxes isolate processes in such a way as to prevent them from causing systemic harm, and because of the way modern antiviruses work, many of them have proven vulnerable to targeted arbitrary code execution attacks -- that's right, proof-of-concept malware exists that can exploit the antivirus suite! This is a major step toward improving the security of the Windows platform, and as far as I can tell, Defender is the first in its class to adopt this sort of fortification.

Right now, It's not set up by default. I'd imagine that may change in the near future.

Users can also force the sandboxing implementation to be enabled by setting a machine-wide environment variable (setx /M MP_FORCE_USE_SANDBOX 1) and restarting the machine. This is currently supported on Windows 10, version 1703 or later.

2018-10-25

Earlier this week, I saw this hot tip from Hack A Day with regards to a high-performance driver for SPI-driven displays on the Pi. That article was published just as I had been digging into getting my Adafruit 3.5" PiTFT display working under Kali so I can run FruityWiFi and other tools with a super-portable kit.

I've had the PiTFT working under Raspbian for years, but Kali isn't Raspbian, and I remember that getting it working the way I wanted, even with the Adafruit helper tool, was somewhat of an ordeal.

Although a number of folks (e.g. re4son) have published unofficial Kali images for the Pi, some of which claim to work with various add-on displays, I tried and a few and failed to get them to work properly, if at all, even without the display. I started with a fresh official Kali Linux 2018.3 RaspberryPi 2 and 3image.

The fbcp-ili9341 driver doesn't work out-of-the-box on Kali, either, but getting it up and running wasn't too hard. It doesn't support touch input yet, but for me, Kali requires at least a keyboard, and my trusty Logitech K400r (affiliate link) is always nearby. One thing I like about framebuffer copy (fbcp) is that you can have the Pi plugged into HDMI (or not...) and the video is mirrored to the TFT, but needless to say, you'll have to start with the Pi plugged into an external monitor until you get the TFT working.

I
put the library files in /opt/vc/lib (I had to create this directory) and then added
it to the libary path by creating a file called /etc/ld.so.conf.d/vc.conf :#vc libs/opt/vc/lib

run ldconfig to reload the library cache.

I'll be going through the steps specific to the Adafruit PiTFT 3.5, however it looks like a lot of various, generic displays have been tested to work, as long as you pass the right options to cmake when you build it. The Readme in the repository has a lot of helpful tips on cmake options, but the basic "get it compiled" instructions are pretty simple:

For the Adafruit PiTFT 3.5 display, this was the magic sauce for the cmake command, though you may wish to mess with the Clock Divisor timing:

cmake -DADAFRUIT_HX8357D_PITFT=ON -DSPI_BUS_CLOCK_DIVISOR=30 ..

Before I ran "make -j" per the above, I edited config.h to make some tweaks, uncommenting two options to get the orientation of the display the way I wanted it (so the Raspberry Pi power plug sticks out of the top when looking at the screen upright) and to fill more of the display:

Once I got it running nicely, I copied the binary to /usr/local/bin/fbcp (because I can't remember "fbcp-ili9341")

Next, I edited /boot/config.txt and experimented with the various video modes to give me a display that was both legible on a tiny screen, and filled as much of the display as possible. I ended up with a 480p 16:9 mode that, combined with the BREAK_ASPECT_RATIO fbcp build config, looks about as good as I can get it on the display. You'll have to tinker with these options to find what works best on yours. I added this to the end of /boot/config.txt:

hdmi_group=1 hdmi_mode=3

If you're cool with running full brightness, you can skip this next part. If you want variable brightness on the backlight, we have to configure GPIO. This display uses GPIO Pin 18 for the backlight LEDs. Other TFTs might not support PWM brightness control, or may use a different pin than 18 for it. By default, the display is on 100% full brightness, but if you tweak the GPIO configuration in the bootloader, you can use PWM to modulate the brightness. I added the following line to /boot/config.txt:

dtoverlay=pwm,pin=18,func=2

This change will kill the power to the backlight at boot (as the PWM mode will default to no power output) so you'll need to initialize and power-up the GPIO at boot if you want the display to be usable. To do this, I created a "rc.local" file in /etc (which systemd will run at boot) to launch the fbcp driver, initialize the GPIO, and set the display to 50% brightness. I'm running a really high frequency on the GPIO because a lower frequencies created a very audible high-pitch whine, and very low values (e.g. periods of 255 to 10000) were not giving any kind of granularity to the backlight brightness. /etc/rc.local:

Reboot to test it out. You should see a white screen (or whatever was on the screen before rebooting) for a few seconds, then the backlight should go out until rc.local is executed right before it goes into GUI mode.

Finally, I created a "backlight.sh" script that handles setting the brightness. You'll need to make this executable, too. Syntax is basically "./brightness.sh (percentage)" where 0 is off, 1 is very dim, and 100 is full brightness.

I've been busy with the new job and getting settled into the new digs here in the Austin suburbs, but I carved out some time to update the OpenBSD/HTTPD/MySQL/PHP guide. There are a few changes to how PHP-FPM is configured, so you may want to pay close attention if you've followed the guide before.

The nginx and apache pages haven't gotten that many views lately, so I am not updating them this go-around. The httpd in OpenBSD's base install is a pretty well-proven web server at this point, and I've been using it in production, reliably, for years now. If you're thinking of running nginx or apache on OpenBSD, I'd urge you to take a look at httpd.

2018-09-25

After a discussion somewhere on teh webs, I decided to dig into the state of PHP 7.1 and PHP 7.2 on OpenBSD. The short version is "we're working on it" (in OpenBSD ports) but no ETA. However, being keen to NetBSD's pkgsrc distribution, I knew that they had been cooking up newer versions in their software tree. So I decided to kick the tires.

Pkgsrc is roughly NetBSD's equivalent to the OpenBSD/FreeBSD "Ports" repository, however, they've put significant effort into making it quite portable. It works in one way or another on other BSDs, Linux, OS X and even more esoteric platforms like Haiku and Illumos.

Initially, bootstrapping pkgsrc on OpenBSD 6.3-STABLE didn't work. Buried deep in my inbox from the pkgsrc mailing list in April, I found a hint from Sevan Janiyan about some patches that are needed to make it work. Partially, this is because OpenBSD uses both clang and gcc compilers in the base distribution on modern hardware.

A "privileged" install requires root (via doas or su) but will store all of the binaries into /usr/pkg:doas ./bootstrap --compiler clang

-- OR --

If you wish to build "unprivileged" without root, the binary packages will be installed in the "pkg" directory under your home dir../bootstrap --unprivileged --compiler clang

Then go have a coffee or something. It takes a while.

If it finishes up with out a screen full of errors, you're almost all the way there:

You'll need to edit your .profile (or .bashrc if you roll that way) to add the pkg/bin directory to your path. In a privileged install, add /usr/pkg/bin and /usr/pkg/sbin to your path. In an unprivileged install, add ~/pkg/bin and ~/pkg/sbin instead.

Adding these paths to the end of the PATH line in the default .profile should work for a privileged pkgsrc install:

You need that in your path, because pkgsrc portable requires you to use NetBSD's "bmake" in the pkgsrc tree, and bmake is compiled as part of the bootstrap. You can log out and log back in, or just run this command to get bmake into your working path.

PATH=$PATH:/usr/pkg/bin:/usr/pkg/sbin

Let's try building something. It works a lot like ports. It will recursively build any dependencies or libraries that are needed, and install them into the pkg directory before building the application you're trying to compile. I'll start with the latest version of PHP in pkgsrc, PHP 7.2, since that's how this whole journey started. I'm using doas since I did a privileged install.

cd pkgsrc/lang/php72doas bmake

It compiled.

I'm going to run doas bmake install without running bmake test because pkgsrc isn't the boss of me.

And it's already in snapshots dated July 12, 2018 and newer. Some mirrors haven't gotten this snapshot yet, as of the time of publication. What this means is that you can load up all of your frequently-used wireless networks into your wifi adapter's /etc/hostname.if file, and it will attempt to auto-join them in the order they're listed. It'll be interesting to see if the installer for OpenBSD 6.4 uses this syntax if you set up a wireless network during the install process.

I like the simplicity of this, versus the complexity of configuring wpa_supplicant, NetworkManager, NetCtl and similar tools. I suspect if you've got only wpa-enabled networks in the list, it should be resistant to most evil twin attacks such as Karma, but I haven't tried that yet.

Documentation of this feature doesn't seem to be covered in the hostname.if or individual wireless driver man pages yet, but the above photo was obvious enough for me to create a working example configuration file for my daily-driver laptop running -CURRENT (on which I'm writing this article).

2018-04-23

No surprises, the existing instructions from OpenBSD 6.1 worked flawlessly for both the httpd and nginx web servers. I just made sure everything still works and updated some version numbers. Once again, I did all of the testing using OpenBSD's built-in vmm hypervisor on my personal laptop, and it did remind me of a few recent changes in vmm's network configuration that I had forgotten about.

2018-04-02

OpenBSD 6.3 was slated for release on April 15th, but it's already showing up on mirrors this morning. It looks like the full package tree is available only for the most popular platforms at the moment, but the install sets for all supported architectures are live on the two mirrors I use most frequently (sonic and ftp5). I haven't checked the rest of the mirrors. Elsewhere on the Internet, I saw a number of core developers confirm the release is underway almost two weeks ahead of schedule.

I'm looking forward to using the improved install script ("Please Listen Carefully as Our Menu Options Have Recently Changed") and taking advantage of some iterative improvements to the VMM hypervisor, such as snapshots and the ability to attach ISO images to VMs.

2018-02-07

Today, I decided to install Windows 2000 Advanced Server onto my Dell Latitude D610. The laptop itself is a workhorse, if a bit dated. Mostly, I was just curious what would happen if I left it out on the Internet without any service packs or firewall rules* and I live-tweeted it as I did my research.

Here's my twitter thread with just a few additional notes added. pcap and IDS alerts are at the end:

So far, the Mirai telnet noise is the most prevalent junk, but I just took my Cowrie honeypot offline for this experiment. Snort with @EmergingThreats ETOpen rules is seeing RDP DoS and SipVicious, and nothing else since the cut-over. Bots are dumb. 30 minutes without being pwnd. pic.twitter.com/tmCyDMWY3Z

Alright, so my ISP is giving me some firewall rules of their own, probably to stop the spread of EternalBlue exploit bots and WannaCry ransomware. Honestly, I appreciate it, but it's not helping me get pwned.

Here's a big part of the... problem? Apparently ATT UVerse is filtering in-bound connections on SMB/CIFS. https://t.co/QZGJLKfikJ (note: this is a good thing, unless you're *trying* to get pwned) There's still plenty of attack surface.

Alright kids, we're about 5 hours in without getting pwned (as far as I can tell). Here's the final count of source-IP/destination port tuples for inbound TCP connection attempts where count > 3. pic.twitter.com/eVF4BxCGGN

2018-01-21

I bought this Casio CFX-9800G calculator in 1995. It's been through everything with me, even, apparently, my college electronics courses (per the "ELEC 120 Progs" thing I found on it):

I bought it because it was about 2/3 the price of the competing TI-81 calculator that was "required" for whatever math class I'd found myself sucked into that semester (I think statistics) and because it was the first calculator I'd ever seen with a color display, even if it was only 3 colors (Orange, green and blue). My math teachers hated anything that wasn't Texas Instruments, because they'd received formal training and supplies from TI. Of course, this extra annoyance was a bit of a pride point for me, and the one kid with his HP 48G.

Now, it sits on my desk at home for calculations that exceed the easy capacity of bc(1) and xcalc. Poking through the program menu, I ran into a few games and helper scripts I've written over the years. Some were password-protected.

It was about this time that I recalled buying the data cable and software. Somehow, I still had the CD on a spindle of old commercial software (among gems like Need For Speed SE, MechWarrior II, and CheckPoint Firewall-1 4.0) and my cable stash is organized enough that it was easy to find in the bucket labeled "Strange proprietary serial cables". One problem: Windows 10 doesn't like 25 year old Casio software. Rebooting my OpenBSD netbook into Windows 7 Starter Edition (ugh) did the trick, though. Add a USB/Serial dongle, and we're off!

I connect the cable, put the Casio software into "receive" mode, then do a data dump from the calculator itself. Things are looking up! Unfortunately, I can only see that these programs exist on the calculator, I can't do much with them aside from delete them from the archive.

I open the file in Notepad++ for giggles, and I'm pleasantly surprised. This whole catalog is ASCII. And I also found a password I haven't used since the late 90s.

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HiR is what happens when 1990s-era e-Zine writers decide to form a blog. Most of us hail from the Great Plains region of the United States.

Ax0n, HiR founder and editor-in-chief is an information security specialist currently working in the luxury goods industry.

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